Steady On, Now Lads!

Yea, it looks pretty grim, it does! No matter, let’s keep piling on the bodies. Worked for our granddads in the Great War, WWI. We weren’t making progress – loosing hundreds of thousands of men in the space of a few hours to gather up a few yards of mud onto our winning side, but we kept on. Some fellow wrote a sentimental poem, “In Flanders Fields,” seemed like a tribute to the poor grunts in the trenches, but it was really a call to arms against those who wanted to try and negotiate a peace, so we kept on, lost a few million men, and probably made things worse in the long-run. And what was the argument? “We owe it to the dead.” Do the dead care? Do the dead, crowding up the Elysian fields really need the company of more soldier corpses? Same argument came up during the last great conflict, the point of which our army had forgotten, Vietnam. Can’t pull out, can’t show weakness, it will embolden our enemies, we’re fightin’ for our lives, can’t let down those who have died. Now the USSR is gone, China is going capitalistic, and the South Vietnamese, bless ’em, want nothing more than to be our good buddies and trading partners. But, we should have kept on…

So today, when a decorated veteran (no, not Kerry!) calls for a pullout, cites the grievous mis-handling of the war, the false intelligence, the fact that our presence makes us a target that inflames the situation. When he points out that we are accomplishing NOTHING positive, when he asks, “Does our administration HAVE a strategy?” we are given rejoinders such as: “We owe it to those who have sacrificed (no, not Cheney!) to keep on [dying]”. “We will not cut and run.” No, we will stay and die for no good reason, much more sensible. Well, I’m asking for volunteers from the administration to be the last man, or woman (c’mon Condi!) to die for a mistake.

Fuck up, and move up…

Pardon my language, but that pithy, Vietnam-era expression that is the title of this post is the first and only thing that came to mind today when I saw the news about President Bush’s picks for the Medal of Freedom: Bremmer, Franks, and…ta da…Mr. SlamDunk Tenet!! I wonder if Mr. Wolfowitz was miffed that he didn’t get the bauble, but he is a sort of backroom, low profile guy, perhaps.Well, the image above of the old parable, The Blind Leading the Blind (Breughel) seems apt here. Perhaps they were not so much the blind leading our non-sightful leader, as the willing-to-see-nothing leading the blind. Does it matter in the end?

I find it hard to understand how people can think that this Iraq ‘adventure’ is going well. Even if you supported the policy in the beginning – why? I dunno. – it seems pretty obvious that these guys are making it up as they blunder along. Are the Iranians laughing into their sleeves as they view the prospect of turning their arch enemy, the Iraqi state, into a satellite via the mechanism of US sponsored elections in which the Shiites dominate? They couldn’t defeat Saddam in a throwback to WWI slaughter, but they just might help to dismember Iraq ‘peacefully’ and then gobble up a good bit of it. Did anyone in the Administration consider this possibility during their ‘planning?’ Is this what they want?

Man, if you’re going to play Rex Imperator, you’d better be ready for the long haul. Not that I support that, but at least I’d know they were thinking.